Film Forum

(1949) Marrying a fisherman to get out of her DP (“displaced persons”) camp looks good to Eastern European Ingrid Bergman (the cast’s only pro), until she goes to his home on the volcanic title island: barren, poor, primitive, patriarchal, and super suspicious of strangers … Hollwood superstar meets neo-realism. DCP. Approx. 106 min. 

Reviews

“Bergman’s solitude is at the heart of Stromboli… Vainly she veers, without apparent progress; yet, without knowing it she is advancing, through the attrition of boredom and of time.”
– Jacques Rivette 

“The brazen originality of Stromboli…is hard to detect, because the tone [it strikes] is one that has become a dominant mode of modern filmmaking. Rossellini turned the dramas of Bergman’s life into her art, and, in the process, presented her on-screen not as a character or even as an actor but as herself.”
­– Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“Stromboli’s portrayal of marriage is trailblazing in that it drops any flicker of high-strung romantic drama to show the institution as a series of negotiations over agency and power. In that, Rossellini set the tone not just for his next two films with Bergman but for all modernist cinematic forays into the intimate universe of spousal anxieties for the next two decades.”
- Dina Iordanova, The Criterion Collection